30/12/2015

2015 playlist

We listen to a lot of music here at Boring Machines HQs. A lot of it is from releases we're planning/working on but we're also avid record buyers. This is a part of the best things we listened in 2015, or, the things we listened more consistently to.

Alessandro Cortini – Forse 3 (Important)
Someone says the if it wasn’t for the NIN hype and for the label, no one would have noticed him. To me, this is exactly what I need to hear many many times in a row to disconnect from everyday routine: long and relaxed sounds, thick as the fog in November in the flatlands.

Arbre Du Ténéré – La Pelle Del Fantasma (Holidays)
The meeting between two distinct, strong personalities like the ones of Maurizio Abate and Ottaven, could have lead to the classic homework, lower that the sum of the two parts. Here we have something that trascends and amplify indefinitely their peculiarities instead.

Helm – Olympic Mess (PAN)
Luke Younger doesn’t make noise, doesn’t make dance or ambient music and yet he’s able to bring together portions of misty, nocturnal landscape romanticism and rough lashes of noise, precisely perched on ever-revolving sequences. Feels like you could here from a distance the cavernous beats of two different clubs at the same time.

Heroin In Tahiti – Sun And Violence (Boring Machines)
There a huge conflict of interests here, because I released this record. But also trying to be objective, there’s no story about it: this record is so beautiful, various, powerful and suggestive, that I can’t help but put it amongst the best records of 2015, but also 2016 because I guess not many will be able to do better for a long time.

Jerusalem In My Heart & Suuns – Jerusalem In My Heart & Suuns (Secretly Canadian)
I was unsure if to put the last solo album from Radwan in this list. I finally chose this collaboration with Suuns because it retains both some peculiarities from the work of Radwan Moumneh and the immediacy of Suuns. In between instrumental super trips like 2amoutu I7tirakan, you can find tracks like Seif, which is my hitsingle of the year.

Kerridge – Always Offended Never Ashamed (Contort)
As an evidence that Kerridge, with this super-violent record, lead the way, this year at Atonal making invasive ambient music with boombastic bass and noisy lashes was the cliche. But nobody have been able to eventually come near Kerridge sound.

Maurizio Abate – Loneliness, Desire And Revenge (Black Sweat Records)
“Power is nothing without control” said an old Pirelli commercial. Well, tecnique is nothing without sensibilty and Maurizio Abate have plenty of both, industrial quantities of it. This fingerpicking record is loaded with romanticism and ideas and returns the live feeling of this recordings.

M.E.S.H. – Piteous Gate (PAN)
Of all the latest hyper-glossy/futuristic records in electronic music fashion that got some attention, this is the only one who I really enjoyed. Maybe it’s because it’s dark, contort and menacing and doesn’t display a simple array of plastic microsounds and harmless little voices.

Squadra Omega – Altri Occhi Ci Guardano (Macina Dischi/Sound of Cobra)
This is (free)rock as it should always be played, without genre boundaries and instrumentation limits. “Sospesi nell’Oblio” is a killer track building on some pneumatic rhythm and freeform guitarism and ending in the most epic way. The perfect pop song without even pronouncing a word.

Taylor Deupree & Marcus Fischer – Twine (12k)
An infinite loop of silent tape with all its pops and crackles from the machine. Few and dilated sounds which intervene just to add a touch of romanticism. Just like that sensation of watching the snow shining under the sun behind a steamy glass. Too bad it can’t be winter forever.

Reissue of the year
Harmonia – Complete Works (Grönland Records)

A lot more passed through our speakers but these are the ones we invite you to put your hands on, if you didn't already.